How to Explode Your Blog’s Traffic Using Pinterest

By Laura | Updated April 13, 2020This post contains affiliate links. If you click through and make a purchase, I will get a commission at no extra cost to you.

Whenever I’m asked for advice on how to grow a blog and drive traffic to it, I say getting serious about Pinterest is key.

But this wasn’t always the case. I actually played hard to get for a pretty long time.

I didn’t understand Pinterest and saw it as yet another time-consuming social media platform that needed my constant attention.

But Pinterest is a wonderfully visual search engine and it wasn’t until I allowed myself to fall in love with it that I started to enjoy all its benefits – including more blog traffic and income.

Truth is, Pinterest is far from needy. Once you understand how it works, you can pretty much let it run on autopilot.

You’ll still have to create attractive, vertical pins for every single blog post that you publish, but most tasks are pretty repetitive and will usually take only a few minutes at a time.

So here are what I believe to be the three best Pinterest strategies to grow your blog’s traffic and promote your brand.

1 | Use Tailwind to schedule your pins

You know I’m all about working smart, not hard. Using a scheduling tool is truly the best thing you can do in terms of both saving precious time and getting more traffic to your blog.

Tailwind is the secret sauce to my entire Pinterest strategy. I’ve been using it for over a year now and I’m totally smitten with it.

It really makes my life easier and helps me easily promote my content, bring my blog posts in front of more people and create a better strategy due to all the awesome analytics it offers.

If you don’t already have a Tailwind account, you can sign up for a free trial, which will allow you to schedule 100 pins for free. Plus plans start from as little as $9.99/month, paid annually, and allow for unlimited scheduling, plus you can join up to 5 tribes (more on this below)

Here’s why I use and recommend Tailwind:

1. Tailwind is an official Pinterest partner

To start with, Tailwind is an official Pinterest partner, which means Pinterest will always show your pins scheduled via Tailwind. Unofficial social media scheduling tools usually lead to lower engagement over time, but this won’t be the case if you use Tailwind.

Plus over 200,000 brands already use Tailwind and these many people cannot be wrong.

2. Smart scheduling

Tailwind’s most basic yet one of the most powerful features is the smart scheduling. This means you can simply choose the pins you want to schedule and Tailwind will automatically pin them based on when your audience is most likely to engage with your content.

You can also space out your pins using the interval pinning feature and shuffle the queue so you won’t pin the same pin in a row.

3. SmartLoop

SmartLoop lets you choose a set of pins and automatically posts them to the Pinterest boards of your choice (over and over again). This eliminates the need for keeping confusing spreadsheets and can save you tons of time in the long run.

You can loop evergreen or seasonal pins. In either case, I recommend you choose your best-performing pins pointing to your most profitable posts.

If you have a Plus plan, 250 SmartLoop posts are already included in it. Power-ups are available in case you need more.

4. Super detailed analytics

While Pinterest gives you access to your account’s analytics when you set up a business account (which is free an I totally recommend you to do if you haven’t already), I have to admit that these stats are not the most detailed.

Tailwind, on the other hand, provides super detailed analytics, down to pin and board level, so you can always know what’s working and what isn’t and which boards drive the most engagement to your pins.

5. Free Tailwind browser extension

The free Tailwind extension lets you schedule pins from any website, including Pinterest.

Once you have it installed, the Tailwind button will start showing when you hover over a pin or image.

Every time I publish a new post, I pin it to my Pinterest blog board (that’s a board I’ve created exclusively for my own blog posts). From there I use the Tailwind button to schedule pins with just one click.

6. The Tailwind Tribes

You could say I saved the best for last, but the tribes are my absolute favorite Tailwind feature. Sure, it’s quite brilliant that you can schedule a whole week’s worth of pins in only 10 minutes, but leveraging other pinners’ followers is even more exciting.

Tribes are basically groups organized around similar interests and work on a pin for pin principle. As a general rule, members must repin at least one pin for every pin they add to a tribe.

Tailwind makes it super easy to see how many pins you’ve added and shared as well as the number of repins you’ve got.

Tribes are free to get started, even if you don’t have a Tailwind account yet. However, if you sign up via my referral link you get $15 credit that you can use if you decide to upgrade your account later.

Once you sign up, you can find tribes that match your blog’s niche or create your own tribe of like-minded people. I have a tribe related to building a business and earning a living online that you can join here.

2 | Join highly engaged & relevant Pinterest group boards

As I’m sure you already know, there are two kinds of Pinterest boards – regular ones where only the board creator can pin and group boards where the board creator has invited other people to pin as well.

Scheduling pins and using Tailwind’s tribes feature to grow a community around your blog is great, but you can (and should) join quality, niche specific Pinterest group boards as well.

I believe using both Tailwind and Pinterest group boards is essential because they are complementary strategies that will benefit and help you reach a wider audience.

But I also believe you should only stick with group boards relevant to your blog’s topic with active members who share each other’s content.

What I mean is if you are a food blogger, don’t join fashion group boards just because you can. Being a contributor to a totally irrelevant board not only doesn’t help you grow your blog but might even harm your Pinterest account’s reputation.

Since you can’t really tell how engaged a group board is just by logging into your Pinterest account, Tailwind‘s board virality and engagement scores come in handy once again.

How to find relevant group boards to join

Pingroupie

Pingroupie allows you to search for group boards based on category (limited to 30+ categories) or keywords found in the board’s description. It also allows you to order the boards by the number of pins, collaborators, followers, repins, etc.

By visiting the profile of other bloggers in your niche

Group boards are public for everyone to see, so it’s super easy to actually figure out which group boards popular bloggers in your niche have joined.

Simply go to their profile and if you follow them, the group boards you are not a member of will stand out because they will be the ones you don’t already follow.

When you visit the board, you will clearly see several profile pics next to the board’s name. If the board is still accepting new collaborators, you can follow the instructions in the board description to ask the group owner for an invite.

3 | Stay consistent

This should be obvious, but if you only pin your content once in a blue moon and don’t engage with other people’s pins, it’s unlikely you’ll see much traffic coming in from Pinterest.

Pinterest, in their Best Practices guide, says ‘Consistent, daily activity is better than a once a week flurry.‘

They also say to ‘Save to your boards during peak times.‘

Which takes me back to Tailwind and their smart scheduling feature that guarantees your content is pinned daily and when your followers are most engaged without you having to lock time for pinning every single day.

Your job is to promote your content

You can create the most amazing, most pinnable images. But just adding them to your blog posts won’t do much for you.

Because your job is to promote your content.

Nobody’s gonna do it for you, especially not in the very beginning when you don’t have much of a fan base. And if we are to be real, even a community of raving fans is unlikely to completely replace you. Give you a day off every now and then? Sure! Replace? Never!

But I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. Building a successful blog requires focused consistent action.

Understanding what works and learning from your successes will help you create a strategy that will free up time for you.

I don’t have time to discover 10,000 ways that don’t work. And I bet you don’t have that kind of time either. We are not Thomas Edison and although sometime it might sound hard to believe, blogging is actually way easier than inventing the light bulb.

So instead of learning from your mistakes, have a look at your successes. These are the experiences that actually count and help you grow.

There are plenty of tools and resources out there that you can start using today and see results in a relatively short amount of time. So my advice is to give Tailwind a try. Plus if you want to make money, this eBook will give you a tried and tested strategy to start making affiliate sales on Pinterest.

ABOUT LAURAHey there dream chaser! I’m a writer, designer and the creator of The Smart Blog Planner. I’m on a mission to inspire and empower you to create a highly profitable minimalist online business and show up for your dreams in a sustainable way.